"Let us be very clear about the true state of the psychologist's art. Psychologists do not know any more about behavior than the average man or woman in the jury box or the judge's robes. Psychologists do not know what causes behavior and they are entirely incapable of pinpointing some hypothetical event in the past that has led to the present state of an individual. They do not know what got done, how it got done, or whodunit. And not only are they unable to predict future behavior any better than the man or woman on the street, they are actually worse at it, blinded as they are by the illusion of their own expertise. Diagnostic categories are not validly established and diagnoses cannot be rendered reliably. Neither can therapy be reliably used to change the behavior of our citizens, juvenile or adult, violent or simply wayward.

"Psychologists have no special ability to read into the soul-or mind or psyche-of another human with any more accuracy than the rest of us. Upon finishing graduate or medical school they are not given special soulographs or psychometers that let them plumb the depths of anyone's psychological being. There simply is no mental stethoscope, no matter how much our justice system wishes there were.

"Clinicians are not trained to perform the myriad tasks the legal system asks them to perform because no body of knowledge exists to support such training. It is a sorry state of affairs, but it is the only state we've got."